ARTICLES ABOUT PAINTING BY DATE - PAGE 3

It was a shore dinner in Maine a decade ago that transformed Robert Gentile, an aging, unremarkable wise guy from Hartford, into the best lead in years in one of the world's most baffling crime mysteries, the unsolved robbery of half a billion dollars in art from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Gentile disagrees with most of what the government says about him. But he does not dispute that he and his wife drove to Portland, Maine, from their home in Manchester, Conn. It was nothing then for the couple to jump into a car and cross New England for a meal.

Robyn Abramson expected to enjoy the dozens of artists displaying their creations Sunday at Allentown's 27th annual Mayfair Festival of the Arts. What she did not anticipate is that she would become a work of art. The New York psychologist was invited to the festival by her sister, Orefield resident Linda Dicker. When Abramson happened upon artist Barnaby Ruhe's exhibition, what she saw made her stop. She was taken by one of his portraits of a woman with long hair and a penetrating look on a blazing red background.

Vandals spray-painted a church and bank in Emmaus earlier this month, police said. A window and door at St. John's Lutheran Church, 5 t h and Chestnut streets, was spray-painted late at night on May 4 or early in the morning on May 5, according to borough police. The damage was estimated at $200. On the same night or morning, a wall on the Wells Fargo bank building at 335 Main St. was spray-painted. The borough police department said it is also investigating vandalism to two mailboxes on the 600 block of Beechwood Street.

Blasts of color will be flying, painting everyone in every shade of the rainbow at a unique outdoor festival noon-4 p.m. Saturday at Northampton Community College. Colored powder will be shot from cannons, and you can buy bags of color to toss in the air, on your friends, and anywhere you choose. The Color Blast Festival is based on the Holi festival, a tradition in India celebrating the passing of spring and the coming of summer. The color is natural food-grade powder made of corn starch, dyes and fragrance.

Sometimes feeling better can be as simple as taking a good whack at a drum. That's Jim Donovan's theory. Donovan, a founding member of the '90s jam band Rusted Root, is one of the workshop leaders in ArtsQuest's new heART series — a collection of events designed to encourage health and wellness through artistic expression. Donovan's theory is not really his own. "As I've studied it, I've realized that a lot of things I've shown people to do are really similar to what people did 300 or 400 years ago," he says.

A local artist has been awarded the Bud and Gretchen Marble Medal for her painting "The View" at the 146th annual International Exhibition of the American Watercolor Society. Carole Pickle, of Emmaus, received her award in April at the exhibition in New York City, according to a press release. She also qualifies to become a member of the Dolphin Fellowship, which encourages artists to continue creating paintings using watercolor. Dolphin Fellowship membership is obtained by merit alone through point system that requires AWS members to win five points in one or more of the international annual exhibitions, the press release said.

There are always musicians and comedians hanging around in the luxury suites at Sands Bethlehem Event Center - DJ Tiesto, 3 Doors Down, Matchbox 20, Stone Sour, Dennis Miller, Bob Saget, to name a few. But to be clear, they aren't physically there. Their spirit is there, however, in the form of paintings by Justin Klement of Whitehall Township. Klement, a music lover, has painted portraits of many of the biggest acts who have performed at the event center since it opened in May 2012.

As part of National Painting Week, volunteers from Sherwin-Williams Paint Store will be giving the Macungie Memorial Park Hall an interior makeover on April 15. Employees are donating their time to complete redo the hallways and bathrooms of the run down facility, according to a press release. National Painting Week runs from April 15 through April 21 and helps to give the community ideas on how to take on home improvement projects, the press release said.

Snuggled in sparse shrubbery beside the red brick walls of a college dormitory is not where one would think to find the father of our nation. Yet the story of one of the Lehigh Valley's great unsolved crimes of 2012 — the theft of a historical, centuries-old painting depicting a victorious George Washington at the Yorktown battlefield — begins at Lafayette College in the bushes near Fisher Hall West. That's where the 3-foot-tall oil-on-canvas work, "George Washington," by renowned American artist Charles Willson Peale was found April 13, still in its gilded frame, less than a day after being reported stolen.

Like father, like son? Not always. Certainly the painting gene passed from the well-known Pennsylvania Impressionist Walter E. Baum, founder of the Baum School of Art, to his son Edgar. But some sort of gene splicing must have taken place, for while the elder Baum's work was consistent in its expressionistic brushstrokes and muted palette, the paintings of Edgar S. Baum are pretty much all over the map — or canvas, wood panel, cloth and slate — which are just some of the materials he painted on. "Edgar S. Baum: For the Love of Painting," on display in the David E. Rodale Gallery of the Baum School through March 15, features 22 of the works by the physician, artist and long-time Allentown resident from some five decades of painting.